Can I Just Tell You??

Can I just tell you how much it irritates me when people who purport to be “religious” engage in unreligious or unethical behaviour??
Can I?
Please….pretty please??

Courtesy: Fotolia

So I was chatting with a woman after an excruciating exhillarating Spin class. She is a member of a local Orthodox shul. In the course of conversation, it came out that she believed that the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College was located in California. I corected her (it is in Wyncote, just north of Philadelphia) but offered that perhaps she was thinking of the Reform school or maybe the Conservative one.

Oh no!” she scoffed, “the Conservative seminary is in New York.”
“Actually, the Ziegler School, on the formerly known University of Judaism, currently known as the American Jewish University campus, is located in beautiful Bel Air.”
“Well,” she insisted, “the real one is in New York.”
“Oh dear, don’t tell the rabbis who were ordained at the Ziegler school,” I responded.
She blinked.
“It really is a legit school. I mean, Elliot Dorff is there.”
“I don’t know who that is,” she said.

She doesn’t know who Elliot Dorff is? Elliott Dorff? She doesn’t known who Elliot Freakin’ Dorff is?? He’s only one of the most brilliant Talmudic minds of his generation. Regarded with great esteem throughout the Jewish and legal communities, he is the foremost expert on ethics as well as the Chair of the Conservative Movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards.

She was not impressed.

This woman then proceeded to commit several acts of lashon ha-ra.

I thought about mentioning my homeboy, the Chofetz Chayim. But if she had never heard of Rabbi Dorff, I didn’t think it was too likely that she was familiar with the Chofetz Chayim.